Product Lead

Product - Remote
This position is no longer available.

 

FishingBooker is the world's leading online travel company specialized in fishing. We are one of Southeast Europe's fastest-growing tech companies, making fishing trips easy for anglers everywhere.

We are looking for a Product Lead ready to change the sportfishing industry with us. As such, you will lead our Product Management team, currently consisting of four product managers.

You will join our team in Belgrade, Serbia, in a fast moving, “scale-up” environment. Reporting to the CEO, you will take part in a vibrant, maturing startup that values strong execution, teamwork and growth.

About us

  • We are a 2-sided online marketplace. We operate in a niche market of the sportfishing industry. We connect the world’s top charter captains and anglers looking to go on private, mostly single-day fishing trips. Our key market is the USA, but we booked captains from 70 countries in the last year, taking more than 400,000 people fishing.

  • We don’t have direct competitors. The industry is complex enough and the size of the market is small enough so that it’s expensive for any new player to become a direct, immediate competitor. The thing big companies can’t easily beat are the costs of running operations from Serbia, even though we pay top salaries.

  • We run an independent, profitable operation. Even though we're part of the tech industry, we like running our business in a healthy, fully independent and sustainable way. We stay away from the Silicon Valley startup culture and venture capital hype.

  • We were brought up on Lean startup principles. That helped us to build up the product by taking small chunks of risk we can chew on. We avoid making massive investments based on assumptions and use data to steer development.

  • We’re experts in customer acquisition. The company roots and initial success are based on deep knowledge of SEO and paid marketing. Highly attuned paid marketing is one of the fundamentals of FishingBooker. Eight years after being founded, FishingBooker is one of the strongest Google Ad partners in the Western Balkans.

  • Our product is complex and offers a multitude of problems to solve. The type of problems we face as a platform is similar to other big online travel platforms (the well-known ones you use to book vacations every year), yet we have two to three orders of magnitude fewer resources than those companies. That's a perfect playground for sharpening your product management skills.

About the job

In this role, your team and you will be responsible for aligning the efforts of our product teams, directly managing our PMs. Your team will drive improvement of the user experience and growth by understanding user needs, identifying new areas for growth, satisfaction and retention, and building products that connect anglers with fishing guides worldwide.

You’ll work closely with the Design, Engineering, Data and QA teams on coming up with and delivering solutions to the problems you and your PMs have identified as valuable. You will also partner with teams such as Customer Happiness, Business Development, Marketing, Legal and Finance to uncover deeper market insights and customer needs.

Our product feedback loop is immediate which means we can rapidly iterate and deploy. If you enjoy iteratively building applications from the ground up, leveraging the newest technologies to delight users, and executing like an entrepreneur in a small, multidisciplinary team, you’ve found the right place.

As the leader of the Product team at FishingBooker, you’ll have the freedom and autonomy to do your best work, with plenty of support along the way, working alongside the people who built the company and still lead it today.

In broad terms, you will be responsible for the following:

  • Product Leadership: Build, mentor, and lead an extremely talented but humble team of Product Managers, while creating and evolving the ideal organizational design.
  • Product Vision: Establish the product vision and strategy for the entire Product team, as well as develop metrics and goals to measure success.
  • Alignment: Build alignment across the goals and roadmaps of various product teams, cross-functional stakeholders (Finance, Marketing, Operations, Customer Happiness, Legal, etc.), and the Executive team.
  • How we work: Implement best in class product development and management practices.
  • Evolving the product. Rapidly iterate and evolve the product to meet customer and captain needs in a high-growth environment, while creating maintainable, scalable two-sided marketplace, and simultaneously looking around corners for future user needs and issues.

Here’s how our team approaches product work:

  • We value lean thinking. We practice a lean approach to product development, using data from multiple sources as well as different product management techniques to discover key problems worth solving.

  • We shape-up solutions. We discover problems in a different way than most companies you've had a chance to work in. When we prove a hypothesis, we conduct thorough planning for the features we build inspired by Basecamp's Shape Up method to ensure long-term maintainability, drive impact and eliminate waste.

  • We don't use scrum. Instead, we work in six week development cycles, followed by a two-week cooldown period reserved to plan the next development cycle, manage technical debt and try out new ideas.

  • We're data-informed. We don’t like to assume what impact our changes will have on user experience and make decisions based only on gut-feel. Instead, we A/B test most changes and rely on thorough instrumentation and access to analytics for data-informed decision making.

  • We're coachable. Because the industry we’re in is a niche that isn’t built into the culture of European nations, we need you to start humble and allow yourself to be coachable, while getting up to speed and gaining confidence to take the lead.

  • We respect your focus. Our entire business is run over Basecamp. That's a work philosophy you'll love once you get your mind into it. You'll be writing more than talking, you'll be reading more than watching. Asynchronous communication means you won't be constantly interrupted and can control and organize your time, maintaining your focus when you are the most productive. 

  • We don't do daily standups. We use written daily check-ins on Basecamp. We value freedom but carry responsibility for our choices.

About you

We’re looking for someone with extensive consumer-facing product management experience and a love for setting up high quality products that users love. You should have a good intuition and eagerness to learn about the dynamics of two-sided online marketplaces. We understand that you won't know how all the systems work on day one, and we don’t expect you to. Solid fundamentals with customer development, product discovery and delivery techniques, experimentation, and teamwork pave the way.

If you consider the following true, there’s a good chance you’re a good fit for this role:

  • You are fluent or native in both English and Serbian.

  • 7+ years of traditional Product Management experience.

  • 4+ years of experience managing teams of Product Managers.

  • Entrepreneurial drive and demonstrated ability to achieve stretch goals in an innovative and fast-paced environment, while building extensible and scalable solutions.

  • Experience with consumer internet products or marketplaces.

  • Passionate about design, aptitude for search engines, obsession with delightful user experience, and ability to bridge the online and offline world.

  • World class product vision, strategy, planning, development, and execution.

  • Strong analytical, data, and troubleshooting skills.

  • Excellent written and oral communication skills.

  • Creative problem solver. Able to identify real obstacles and viable solutions.

  • Outcome-oriented. Not reactionary, articulates the desired outcome and works collaboratively to create a path to achieve it.

  • Deep understanding of technical architecture for complex and highly scalable web and mobile applications.

  • Ability to quickly absorb technical concepts and effectively simplify and communicate them to a non-technical audience.

Pay and benefits

  • Full-time contract. FishingBooker hires Product Managers on a full-time employment contract (ugovor o radu) and offers 23+ days of paid vacation, plus public and religious holidays observed in Serbia.

  • Pay in the top 10%. We pay in the top 10% of tech companies depending on your seniority rate for tech jobs in Belgrade, Serbia. We assess seniority relative to the team at FishingBooker during the interviewing process.

    • Product Lead: 5.100 EUR to 6.100 EUR net* (possible to invest part of salary into equity plan)

  • Clear career path. When we start working together, every six months (April and October) you will receive a detailed performance review from your team lead with clear instructions on how to grow further. During these periods, you will also be elgibile for salary increases based on how you progress in line with the career path. 

  • Flexible hours. You are free to set your own working hours, as long as they allow for good collaboration with your teammates. At FishingBooker, we value flexibility, freedom and focus. We are a remote-friendly company and the majority of our team works from home.

  • Remote friendly workspace. Though we are an office-optional company, the Product Lead role will require you to be office based for at least 70% of your working days. Our office is next to Delta City in Novi Beograd and has plenty of parking available if you prefer to come to the office by car.

  • Private health insurance. You'll have a chance to participate in our private health insurance plan, fully subsidized by FishingBooker. Additionally, if you are interested in transferring your family to our insurance partner, we can assist with negotiating terms.

  • Mentor and a full onboarding plan. Although we are looking for someone with experience, you will be assigned a mentor as well as a full onboarding plan where you will learn the ins and outs of the business, how we work in the team and our tech stack. We also provide company-sponsored books, training, and courses.

  • Company sponsored fishing trips. It’s important that you get to experience the product FishingBooker sells, so we will treat the whole company to a fishing trip every year. In 2019 we went to Rovinj, Croatia and in 2018 we went to Fujairah, UAE. You will have a diverse team of supportive, caring and friendly colleagues from all over the world with whom you’ll be able to enjoy additional team-building activities over the course of the year. 

  • Apple equipment. Our standard equipment setup typically includes the latest Apple Macbook Pro 14’ or 16’, coupled with 1-2 Dell Ultrasharp monitors and the Magic Mouse / Keyboard combo. If you prefer to work with a different setup, you’ll be able to choose your equipment, of course.

We look forward to hearing from you! ✌️